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How to mark a quilt for a wavy border

You might have noticed this quilt in my sidebar of UFOs. OK, it looks a little different. My original plan was to put my first-ever scalloped border on it but I chickened out. I saw a picture of a quilt with a wavy border with much gentler curves and I knew that’s what I wanted to do for my first time.

The time has finally come for me to get this thing finished. I spoke with my longarmer, Sara Parrish, about it and she requested that I mark the waves on the border so that she can quilt right up to it. So I’ve done that and I wanted to share my method.

Since I used Electric Quilt to design the quilt, printing templates for marking was a breeze. I “printed” them as PDFs (although that part of it was not really necessary. Experienced EQ users have learned that if you go ahead and make a PDF out of your templates rather than sending them straight to the printer, you don’t have to go back and re-invent the wheel if you need to re-print) and when you’re doing this, don’t forget to change “page scaling” to none when you send the PDF to the printer. I didn’t the first time so was glad I had made the PDFs.

Here you can see that I had to overlap and tape together two pages for each of the larger templates, which is not a problem because EQ shows you right where they are supposed to overlap. You can’t see it here, but I printed two templates for the corners.

My next step was to trace the templates onto freezer paper.

Once the templates were cut out, I simply pressed them (shiny side down) to the border. I marked the vertical centers on each template (even the corners because I had mitered the border) for correct placement.

You may find, as I did, that the templates don’t exactly line up with each other correctly. If they’re not off by much (maybe you didn’t get them precisely overlapped or the freezer paper shrunk a little when ironed on) and as long as you’ve got each one centered, go ahead and draw around the outside edge of the template with your marking tool of choice (I used a fine point Sharpie as I got a better line than I did with the Pigma pens I own. They’re pretty old.) Take off your templates and freehand a connecting line between the two templates. No one will be the wiser. Because of the versatility of freezer paper, the templates can be re-pressed to all sides of the border.

You can’t see the line very well in this next photo, but it’s there. When I take it to Sara, I’m going to ask her to baste just inside the line for me (I think she normally does that). Then when I get it back from her, I’ll cut all three layers on the line and attach the binding just like normal. With the gentle curves, I can use a straight-grain binding.

This quilt needs a name. The back story is that it was originally intended for a friend who had just gotten a cancer diagnosis. It was going to be a healing quilt. But she had successful surgery, didn’t need further treatments and didn’t need a healing quilt. At 66″ square, it’s probably too big for that purpose anyway. So I think the name should reflect gratitude to God for the outcome, what do you think? Any ideas?